The monitors registered first. Steady beeping, the green trace of a heart rhythm moving across a screen. An IV line running from a pole into the back of Isaac’s right hand. Then the bed, and Isaac in it, and the air left her lungs.
She’d seen him in the warehouse. She’d seen him tied to a chair with his face opened up and his ribs caved in and blooddried in dark lines from his temple to his jaw. She’d watched Kessler hit him, and she’d watched him get back up.
She’d watched him put himself between her and a man with a knife when his own body was barely holding together, fueled by nothing but refusal to let her be hurt.
Twenty-four hours of medical care had cleaned the blood away, and without it, the damage was starker. Both eyes swollen shut, the left side of his face a deep, mottled purple that spread from his brow to his jaw. The bridge of his nose taped beneath bandaging. Compression wrapping from his sternum to his waist, and above it, bruising that climbed his neck and fanned across his collarbone.
This was what protecting her had cost him.
She crossed the room. Each step was deliberate, the last reserves of what her body had left spent on the act of closing the distance between the door and his bed. She lowered the rail with her forearm because her hands couldn’t grip it. She eased onto the mattress beside him, careful of the IV line and his wounds.
But she had to be with him. Shehadto.
She put her head on his chest, not letting her weight sink on to him any more than it had to. His heart beat under her ear. The same pulse she’d pressed her fingers against on the warehouse floor while the darkness took her.
His heartbeat was here.Hewas here.
Isaac stirred. His right arm moved, heavy and slow, and settled across her shoulders. His left hand found her hip. The grip had no coordination, the pull of a man surfacing from somewhere deep.
The door clicked shut behind her. Ryder, giving them space.
She didn’t move. Isaac’s chest rose and fell beneath her. The monitors kept their rhythm. His arm stayed across her shoulders, warm and heavy.
She might have slept. She wasn’t sure. Time had gone soft and unreliable, measured only in the steady push of Isaac’s breathing and the quiet beeping of the machines beside the bed.
A knock brought her back. The door opened. Ryder’s voice, low and close.
“Cass wants to talk to you.”
Fallon lifted her head. He was holding a phone toward the bed, the screen lit, a call already connected. She took it with both hands, cradling it between her palms, and brought it to her ear.
“Cass.”
“You absolute reckless lunatic.” Cassandra’s voice broke wide open on the third word. “You left me a goodbye voicemail. A voicemail, Fallon. While driving to a warehouse to trade yourself for a man you’ve known for a short period of time.”
“I know.”
“I was in the bathroom. Three minutes. I was in the bathroom for three minutes and you almost died because I didn’t pick up the phone.”
“I almost died because I chose to go. You’re the reason I didn’t.”
Silence on the other end. Ragged breathing. The sound of someone held together by nothing but stubbornness and fury.
“You called Ryder,” Fallon said. “You turned a goodbye into a rescue, Cass. That was you.”
“Don’t.” Cass’s voice was thick. “Don’t make me the hero of this. I sat in my apartment and cried and dialed a phone number. That’s all I did.”
“Well, it was everything.”
A shaky exhale. Then, quieter: “Is Isaac okay?”
“He’s going to be.”
“Good.” A pause. “I love you, too. You said it in the voicemail, and I need you to know that. I love you, too.”
“I know, Cass.”
“Okay.” Her voice steadied by one degree. “Go be with your man. I’ll be here when you need me.”
